


Alive in Memory

by darth_vaporwave



Series: The Inner Light Series [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dream Sequence, Gen, Mourning, That's Not How The Force Works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:08:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22275349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darth_vaporwave/pseuds/darth_vaporwave
Summary: One night after Leia's passing, Rey dreams of a desert with two suns and a man she seems to know, but can't remember.
Series: The Inner Light Series [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1586164
Comments: 1
Kudos: 24





	Alive in Memory

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prologue of sorts for a much longer fic I'm working on. It begins right after TLJ, which is when I started writing it.
> 
> I was also pretty broken up about Carrie Fisher's death at the time, having just seen her last on-screen appearance in TLJ. She's passed on in the fic the way she did in life. 
> 
> Title comes from lyrics in Trees of Eternity's song "My Requiem," to stick with my super-original fic naming theme.

Rey opened her eyes to the searing blade of sunlight, in a wide world of sand and sky. That wasn’t right.

Where was she?

 _Dreaming of Jakku?_ But that wasn’t right either -- rocky mountains ruptured the horizon-line. Jakku was an ocean of sand. And Jakku didn’t have two suns.

When she turned on the spot, the sand didn’t rise around her ankles. The sun was blazing bright but she couldn’t feel the heat. Restless trails of sand stirred in the wind, but around her, there was only stillness. It wasn’t like her connection with B -- _Kylo Ren_ , where she had been able to see only him.

She bent and tried to scoop up a handful of sand. Her hand simply passed through the grains, like they, or maybe she, was made of the mist that had risen from the grass and rocks on Ahch-to.

_Definitely dreaming, then._

Twin suns. . .

The thought stirred like a far-off sound in the skeleton of a stripped star destroyer, like an echo she should recognize.

She stood and marveled at the way sand did not cling to her hem.

There was a lot more here than on Jakku. A herd of shaggy creatures dotted the valley bowl; a battered old vaporator clung to a rocky outcropping close enough that, squinting one eye shut, she could cover it with a finger; and behind her --

The cloaked man pushed back his hood. A bearded face with bright pale eyes peered at her. The hem of his robes was tattered, and all of him had seen better days.

Some echo in that star destroyer of memory whispered to her, then faded. She definitely didn’t know him.

“Good afternoon,” he said. His reddish hair was soaked with sweat at the temples; his eyes were sharp and clever.

“Is it?” She honestly wasn’t sure if the day on which she’d fallen asleep had been a good one or not. Good days on Jakku had meant getting to the end of them alive. That benchmark no longer seemed adequate, with everything she’d lost.

“I have no complaints,” said the stranger, still watching her. “May I ask where you came from?”

“I’m dreaming.” She wished she could feel the warmth from the sun. She put up her hand, but nothing touched it. The suns hung at different heights, pulling her shadow and his in overlapping waves. “Where am I?”

“Tatooine. I can think of much pleasanter places to dream of.”

 _And much worse ones_.

“Tatooine,” she repeated. She knew that name. She could almost catch the echo in the star destroyer of memory. “So that’s it.”

“Is it?” He moved toward her, but slowly, as if worried she would run or attack him. But this was, so far, an almost pleasant dream. She held out her hands, showing their emptiness.

“I thought I should know twin suns from somewhere. I suppose. . .” She trailed off, forgetting already what she thought she’d remembered. “I dream of places, sometimes.”

“Well,” he said slowly, “there’s no need to stand out in this heat. Would you care to come inside where it’s cool?”

Rey didn’t feel the heat, but he looked ready to wilt. She followed him up the sandy rise into a round hut nestled against the rocky outcropping; the vaporator on the spire above must be his. To her, the hut’s inside was spacious and luxurious.

“Forgive the dust,” he said, “I’ve just been settling in. I don’t suppose, since you’re dreaming, that you’d care for anything to drink?”

Rey always cared for something to drink, but surely she would pass through it like the sand. “I don’t think it would work very well. But you should have something.”

“Thank you, I shall,” he said with a funny sort of smile, one that passed through his face but stayed off his mouth.

Rey wandered over to the kitchen area, where he was pouring pale blue liquid into a stone cup.

“Blue milk,” he said, showing it to her. “Not particularly appetizing, but water is scarce, after all.”

Rey knew all about that. Before Takodana, she had never known that all water didn’t come with a fine film of sand.

“Your vaporator’s probably not getting enough out of the air for you,” she said. “It’s got a bad motivator.”

He appraised her over the rim of his glass, then ran a thumb across the edge of his mouth, where pale milky droplets had clung to his beard. “I didn’t know you’d been out there long enough to have a look. You rather. . . appeared as I stepped outside.”

“I can hear it. It’s quiet here.” She closed her eyes, listening to the whir of the vaporator chugging away above the house. “There’s a buzz that shouldn’t be there -- makes the whole thing too loud. Bad motivator. You’re not running at optimum resonance like that. Won’t pull as much water out of the air as it should. You can either replace the motivator or fix it, depending on what you have to trade.”

“I see.”

She couldn’t read him in the Force; he was as closed off as the dusty hallways beyond the rigged blast doors in the abandoned Rebel base. But the depth of his spirit was as powerful as the tide on Ahch-to. The only person she’d felt with that kind of unassailable integrity was Leia -- and that endless ocean of sorrow. . .

Suddenly her eyes were stinging. The tears fell unexpectedly. On Jakku, she’d never had to deal with them. There was no moisture to waste. She’d cried a lot since she’d left. It was a strange sort of luxury.

This man’s face showed an emotion she couldn’t put a name to, but it made her heart clench like a fist _._ He stood like he didn’t know what to do. When Rey cried, BeeBee-Ate would bump against her leg and chirp. Leia would reach out and put her arms around her.

Rey reached up and wiped the tears away. “She’s gone. Just -- Dr. Kalonia said it was a heart attack. All of a sudden. . . and the medical frigate was gone, the Falcon doesn’t have anything. . . She survived all of that. But now she’s gone.”

His expression shifted; it made her eyes sting again and another tear slip down her cheek.

“I barely knew them,” she whispered, “but it hurts so much that they’re gone -- like a piece of me has been carved out. It throbs. I feel. . . so alone. I’m so alone, Obi-Wan, and it’s so cold -- ”

“What did you call me?” He’d gone pale.

“What?” She tried to think. Something was beating through her head, like a bad motivator, a rapid heart-beat, the pulse of blood when she cut herself on a jagged bit of metal. “I don’t. . .”

_R ey_

She looked around.

“Who are you?” The man set aside his cup.

_Re y y o u nee d t o wa k e up_

“ _I’m_ not dreaming,” the man said, taking a step forward. “Who are you?”

_Rey!_

The hut faded and fell apart into wisps of smoke, of fog. The man hung bright against the dark backdrop of nothingness as the hum of machines rose around her and chirps sounded in her ears and a warm hand rested on her shoulder. Then he vanished.

She squinted her eyes open.

Poe hovered over her, his face smudged in shadow and the Falcon’s soft battered lights. He was crouched next to on the metal floor of the Falcon’s cockpit, one hand on her shoulder and the other pressed against her palm.

“You okay?” he asked. “You were -- making things rattle.”

She pushed herself up on her elbows. Her head felt stuffed with fluff, as if the porgs had made a nest in her ear. Her face was wet, like she’d been really crying. She touched her cheek and stared at the moisture on her fingertips.

“I. . . it was a dream.” She sat up, curling her legs under her, wiping at her face.

Poe pulled a soft cloth square out of his pocket, rotated it until he found a clean spot, and put it in her hand.

It smelled like BeeBee-Ate’s buffing polish, greasy and comforting. She patted at her face, enjoying the softness.

“Do you want to talk about it?” His voice was quiet, the way everyone spoke once it was lights-out. With so many of them on the Falcon, they had to be careful for each other. That must’ve been why Poe had woken her when she was making everything rattle. He never woke anyone else up. “ _People need to get through bad dreams,”_ he’d told her when she’d tried to awaken Rose one night. “ _It’s part of how they process._ ”

Rey would rather be woken up, though. Too many nights on Jakku, she’d been alone with those dreams of emptiness.

She drew the man’s image to the front of her mind: the face ( _kind, like Finn’s and Poe’s, weary like Luke’s, resolute like Leia’s_ ), the clever eyes, the reddish hair and beard. What had she called him? She couldn’t quite remember. . .

“It wasn’t upsetting,” she said, plaiting the buffing cloth in her lap. “At least. . . not what happened? I -- remembered Leia, and I started crying, and he -- there was a man, someone I didn’t know, from Tatooine -- ”

“Not Luke?” Poe said, frowning. “No, not if you didn’t know him. . .”

“No, he had sort of red hair. Luke’s was yellow when he was young.” Then her brain caught up to her ears. “Luke was from Tatooine?”

She’d always thought Luke Skywalker was a myth, the Jedi who’d defeated Darth Vader. Everyone knew that story, even scavenger-nothings from Jakku. Why the star destroyers lay broken in the sand ( _Luke Skywalker, the last Jedi_ ), why the AT-AT’s lay curled around the wreckage of an X-Wing ( _Darth Vader dead, the Emperor too, and it all ended in the battle of Jakku_ ). But nobody had mentioned where he’d come from. She was sure of that. She might not have doubted he was real if she’d known he came from the desert, just like she had.

“I thought it was almost familiar,” she said. “Twin suns. . .”

“It’s in the Outer Rim. Hutt-space -- it used to be controlled by Jabba, until Luke and Leia took him out.” Poe looked pleased with that, almost proud, and then it folded into sadness, as he remembered what -- who -- they’d lost. “But yeah, most people forget that bit. They’ve never even heard of Tatooine. Leia said Luke called it ‘the farthest place from the bright center of the universe.’”

“It didn’t seem so bad,” she said quietly.

Poe looked at her, in a way she couldn’t quite read. It gave her the same feeling as the first time she had held a snowflake on the tip of her finger and watched it melt.

“I’ve never been, actually,” he said. “What’s it like?”

She told him about the stillness bracketed by the banthas, the colors of the mountain ridge, the overlay of shadows, the vaporator that chugged off-kilter above the round house.

“He said _he_ wasn’t dreaming. He invited me inside, offered me liquids.” It was a lot, for a stranger. She didn’t know much about people, but she knew what it was like to live in a desert. “He just. . . talked to me. And I felt -- sort of like I knew him. The way I knew the suns.”

Poe sat on the rumbling grating next to her, the Falcon’s wall against their backs. His fingers were laced together loosely, elbows propped on his folded knees. He listened as she talked, with full focus, though it was so late that it was far too early.

“You think it’s a Jedi thing?” he asked. “A Force thing, I mean? The way you used to dream about the Jedi temple-tree?”

Of course that was it. That dream, almost as solid as the link to B -- to Kylo Ren.

But she’d never dreamed about Tatooine before. She’d recognized the island immediately. She’d recognized Kylo Ren on Takodana, from the knowledge Luke’s lightsaber had poured into her head, though she’d hadn’t a name for him. This was like something she struggled to remember, like the faces of her parents. . .

She turned away from that thought, pushed it away, although it clung with sudden intensity. _What if Ren was wrong--_

“Obi-Wan,” she whispered, testing it. Was that the name of her. . .

“Wait,” said Poe, his voice rising suddenly with surprise, “Obi-Wan Kenobi?!”

The hair on her arms prickled sharply. _I’m so alone, Obi-Wan, and it’s so cold. . ._

“Obi-Wan Kenobi lived on Tatooine for nineteen years.” Mindful of the need for quiet, Poe had dropped his voice, but though softer, it still vibrated with excitement. “He brought Luke there to keep him safe from Darth Vader and the Emperor. That’s who you met?”

She nodded, her head feeling suddenly crowded. Poe scooted a little closer, like he couldn’t quite contain himself, his face lit up like the first time he’d sat in the Falcon’s co-pilot seat.

“ _Wow_. What’s he like?”

“I didn’t get that long to talk to him. I told him his vaporator needed fixing.”

Poe laughed softly, like what she’d said was funny. It made her want to smile in response. She liked laughter.

“But he was. . .” ( _pieces of Finn and Poe, Luke and Leia_ )

That expression on his face as she’d cried -- she’d seen it on Leia’s face when Luke had suddenly faded into the Force, flakes of salt and ash falling between them on Crait, sticking to Rey’s eyelashes and stinging when she blinked.

“Kind,” she said, “but sad.”

Poe’s excitement had dimmed; he wore compassion in the Force. He nodded. “Vader and the Emperor destroyed the whole Jedi Order. General Kenobi was one of the only ones left.”

_I’m so alone, Obi-Wan_

“But how did I know him?” she asked quietly.

“You’ve got me on that one,” Poe said, equally quietly. “But the Force works in mysterious ways.”

That, she thought, was certainly true.


End file.
